


A Soft Plunge

by olga_eulalia



Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, Purely self-indulgent SilverFlint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-09
Updated: 2017-11-09
Packaged: 2019-01-31 07:30:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12677229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olga_eulalia/pseuds/olga_eulalia
Summary: Unbeta'd. Non-native speaker writing here.





	A Soft Plunge

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd. Non-native speaker writing here.

Next to him, Silver skidded to a halt, pulling a grimace. He looked drained, his skin pale in the moonlight, and white sand powdered his hair.

"Are you all right?" Flint asked, surveying him from head to foot.

“Yeah,” Silver said. Though he was still in the process of catching his breath, the skin around his eyes creased again and a grin brightened his face, flashing as sudden as rocks in a storm.

Charmed by the audacity of it, Flint smiled back. All that frantic beating of his heart, all the desperate worry about retreat having been the wrong choice, about moving too fast for Silver to be able to keep up the pace, seemed a bit unreasonable now that they had made it so far without getting chased down.

Silver craned his head upwards. "Do you think they foll--"

Flint shushed him by putting a hand over his mouth, watching with bated breath as an avalanche of sand trickled down the slope towards them like fine sugar.

They listened. Silver with wide, unblinking eyes, even after Flint had removed his hand and used it to ready his pistol.

Cool night air moved along the sand and among the grasses with the stealth of a skilled hunter. Even though the beach lay otherwise deserted at this hour, it was impossible to tell whether someone was drawing a weapon or someone else was giving a low whistle to indicate their hiding spot when the sea spilled itself in wave upon wave onto the shore in such a noisy, fitful play, one lazy whoosh continuously interrupting another.

The intensity with which Flint’s senses were straining opened them up to other sensations as well. He noticed how Silver’s body had untensed and relaxed back into the sand, how it was lying there so compactly now, so unlike the ungraspable, uncontainable idea that always replaced it in its absence and attached itself to every other thought in his mind, how drawn he felt by the real warmth and the real scent of it, both of which were well-known and comforting at this point like--

Flint refused himself the rest of the thought. He dug his boots into the sand and, bit by bit, pushed himself back up the steep incline, almost having to claw his way to the top, so that he could take a peek over the edge.

"Anything?" Silver whispered, busy brushing the sand out of his beard and shaking it from his hair, when Flint came sliding back down to him.

Flint's tongue flicked against the inside of his lower lip impatiently. "No."

"What if they return with reinforcements?"

"Unlikely."

"Or hounds?"

Flint pulled his coat aside, exposing his knife holster, and pulled the blade from the sheath there, airing the glint of its sharp edge for a moment.

Silver was not comforted by the sight. "You've never been chased by a pack of them, have you?"

"And you have?"

"You know I was against this whole endeavour from the beginning,” Silver deflected.

"You might also remember that your concerns were duly noted," Flint said, entertained by the way his words made Silver’s mustache give a displeased twitch. "And that I said I’d prefer it if you to stayed on the ship."

"I was curious," Silver said, on the defensive.

"Curious?" Flint raised one eyebrow, disapproval of the proverbial cat tinging his voice.

But, of course, Silver would not have wanted to be left out of an important meeting. Nor should he have been. 

Captain Marling of The Eagle, who was bolstering their war effort with ample manpower and their fleet with a sturdy three-master, had made contact with another interested party, whose support could swell their force to a size that promised swift and certain victory over Rogers’s men. All this potential ally still needed was a bit of convincing, a task for which there was no one better suited than Silver. If anyone could have tipped the man’s opinion in their favour, it certainly would’ve been him.

They’d rendezvoused in a ramshackle tavern on the southern coast of an island that held little strategic import, where Rogers’s spies were less likely to keep an eye on their activities and where they could hone their plans far away from everyone else’s overbearing manners and hampering views. But not even an hour into the talk, the sight of five mounted soldiers steering their horses towards the building had made a quick exit through the back door unavoidable and then demanded that they split their group in two. While Captain Marling and his acquaintance had hightailed it up north, he and Silver had made their way towards the beach, their flight taking them through some bushes of stunted growth and across a landscape of coastal dunes, where it had been interrupted by a rather abrupt drop.

Less than a quarter of a mile separated them from the spit of land to the west behind which their longboat lay in wait. But Flint didn’t want to risk getting caught by cavalry on open terrain, so they would continue on the more arduous path across the dunes. Five men patrolling the shoreline out here, in a place situated at the edge of nowhere, were at least three too many to be a coincidence.

Along these lines, Flint had just begun to brood when his thoughts found themselves violently rousted.

Silver, making himself more comfortable where he rested with much of his throat and upper chest exposed, exhaled loudly. "Yes, curious,” he said. “It was something that -- well, I’m not going to name names, but -- most of the crew told me they’d noticed."

"And what was that?" Flint asked, vaguely interested.

"That you seemed gentled."

"Gentled?" Flint threw a surprised glance at Silver. Of the many things he’d expected to hear, this was was not one of them.

"That was my first reaction, too," Silver confided. His voice was smooth and low, just loud enough to be heard, sounding almost as if he were talking to himself. "But it seems that a certain distance made it easier for them to see, long before I did, that you'd become less unforgiving, less prone to anger, less unmovable."

Flint took a long, hard look at the sand with its moonlit ripples and the spindly vegetation poking through. In that moment, everything except Silver’s words seemed very muted and distant, and the deep ocean lapped against the island as meekly as a tamed beast that had chosen to forget its roar for a while.

"Softer somehow," Silver went on. "And I was racking my brain, but I knew it wasn’t drink or some other narcotic. And I knew it couldn’t be blind confidence, either. Or its opposite, for that matter, because I'd seen you back then and it wasn’t that."

Flint’s eyes narrowed as he was trying to figure out just how exactly, especially now that his new reputation ascribed him less anger, he should react to the fact that the state of his mind was deemed an acceptable topic of conversation among his crew and that even Silver joined in ruminations about it instead of simply posing the question to him outright.

"The amount of time I spent trying to untangle this is embarrassing, really, especially when the solution is so obvious,” Silver said.

"It is?" Flint asked, blinking once, his gaze meeting Silver’s.

"Of course. Considering his enthusiasm for the cause, the contempt he holds for every man who would call himself a civiliser, the enormous expertise he brings to his captaincy, the way he commands his crew by just being, it is not so difficult to imagine how someone could feel themselves drawn to Captain Marling."

"Captain Marling.” Flint stared.

"I mean, not that his dashing looks are not worthy of note," Silver said. "One should never underestimate the power of such. I bet there are a couple of men who’d tell you that they’d joined his crew for no other reason."

The smile on Silver’s face was soft and timid, and like a shy thing it went into hiding when Flint failed to encourage it with one of his own.

"It's not Captain Marling," Flint said, slowly and carefully, trying not to clench his jaw, well aware that he wasn't disputing the rest.

"It's not?" Silver asked, swallowing hard.

"No, it's not," Flint said.

Silver thought for a long moment. "You’re certain?"

"Yes." Flint nodded. His eyes were tracking the way that Silver, by shifting just a little, acquired a curious tilt to his head, a calm perceptiveness in his expression. “Quite,” he said.

They might as well have been reciting, in turns, the text of a half-forgotten rhyme or a sea shanty, the words to the spell mattered little beyond the way they focused their attention on each other completely and the way they coaxed tenderness out of her hiding place and made her strike up her old song which would soon have them humming that familiar tune which kindled the heart and lit up the face, which made every breath feel deep and profound, but the ribcage still too small to contain the boundless sense of anticipation, this longing for another glance, another fleeting touch and, hopefully, an affirmation.

"James?" Silver said. His face, framed by the dark spill of his hair, was turned wholly towards Flint. The shimmer of moonlight was between his lips and in the feathery shade of his eyelashes also. It pooled in the dip of his throat next to his silver pendant like liquid waiting to be sipped at.

"Yes?" Flint said, moving closer. He stretched out alongside Silver’s body and angled himself towards it so that they could confer more intimately, so that their secrets would be safe even from the most insistent breeze.

Silver reached out and cupped Flint’s cheek with a warm and tender touch, brushing his thumb back and forth over the beard at the corner of Flint’s mouth.

Flint peered down into Silver’s eyes, feeling unstable, about to take a plunge, and reached out, too. Singling out a lock of Silver’s hair, he brought it to his lips and kissed its silky end as it curled around his finger.

Silver, this time, didn’t respond with words, though it seemed for a moment that he might. He simply clasped the side of Flint’s head more tightly and then guided him further down, home, while the moon was bright, but the stars faded.


End file.
